E-catalog (punch-out catalog)
An e-catalog is a digital catalog of pre-approved products at negotiated prices that employees shop from inside their company's procurement system. Hosted catalogs store the supplier's content within the buyer's system; punch-out catalogs hand the user off to the supplier's own webstore, then return the filled cart to the procurement system for approval. Both channel repeat purchases toward contracted pricing.
Examples
Punch-out flow: A lab tech needs pipette tips. She clicks the lab-supplies distributor's tile, lands on the supplier webstore showing her company's price of $48.50 per case against a $61 list price, and builds a $312 cart. The cart returns as a requisition, auto-approves under the $500 threshold, and the purchase order transmits within minutes.
Hosted catalog control: A fastener supplier's hosted catalog carries 1,200 SKUs at fixed annual pricing. When the supplier submits a mid-year price file with a 4% increase, the buyer rejects the load until the contract reopens. A punch-out site would have shown the new prices silently.
Channeling the tail: A 600-person plant routes purchases under $1,000 through two punch-out catalogs. Card-based tail spend falls from 38% of transactions to 11% in two quarters, mostly because the catalog is faster than filing an expense report.
Definition
Catalogs exist to make the compliant path the easy path. If an engineer can find nitrile gloves at the contract price in 30 seconds inside the e-procurement system, she will not buy them on a corporate card at list price. Most maverick spend is friction avoidance rather than rebellion, and a usable catalog removes the friction.
The two flavors differ in where content lives. A hosted catalog is a price file the supplier delivers and the buyer loads, controls, and approves internally. A punch-out catalog works as a round trip: the user clicks the supplier's tile, lands on a contract-priced version of the supplier's own webstore, shops normally, and checks out. Nothing is purchased on the supplier's site. The cart travels back as a purchase requisition that follows normal approval workflow before becoming a purchase order.
Hosted content is easier to police but goes stale between updates; punch-out content stays current but shifts control to the supplier, so contract-price audits matter more. Both are indirect procurement tools for repeat, specifiable items. Direct materials with part-specific negotiated pricing rarely fit a catalog, which is why catalogs solve office, MRO, and lab purchasing rather than sourcing.
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